During the past few months, folk music-veteran Patty Larkin has had reason for professional celebration and personal grief.  The year 2010 marks her 25th anniversary of singing, songwriting and stunning guitar work, a career that has produced 10 albums, an honorary doctorate from the Berklee College of Music and a coast-to-coast following of discriminating listeners.

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When Mike Seeger passed away at his home in Lexington on Aug. 7, America lost more than a great singer and entertainer. The country lost one of its great cultural treasures. There was no doubt that Mike was an accomplished musician, seemingly able to pick up any stringed instrument and play it better than anyone else. Then there was that voice that not only reminded his audience of another time and place, but seemed actually to transport them back to that other time and place. Mike Seeger did not just sing old-time American music, he was its very embodiment.

While “legend” and “icon” labels are dispensed pretty freely these days, Canada’s Gordon Lightfoot has earned them both, as well as most any other superlative that comes to mind, with an almost five-decade career of folk-music singing and songwriting.  The roots of that career can be traced to California’s Westlake College, where the central Ontario native spent a year studying jazz composition.

Dr. Euclid M. Hanbury Jr. had three great loves in his life: Caryll McConnell, a former girlfriend whom he found again and married 55 years later; medicine and music. Dr. Hanbury died Friday at his Orange County home. He was 82. He was a hospital clinical administrator who had earned a fellowship at the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City and had taught surgery at the University of Virginia School of Medicine.